Coke comes out with new drink dispenser, 104 flavors

Coca-Cola is about to light the rocket beneath a project that may, with luck, slightly reinvent the brand for the 21st Century: It’s ready to take its amazing Freestyle drinks makers mainstream, with 104 user-controlled flavors.

The device is essentially a ground-up reinvention of the decades-old free-standing drinks dispenser, with its crates of flavor syrup, chilling equipment and water supply, ready to spew out two or three varieties of cold carbonated drinks. Unlike these old systems, which have more in common with the kind of complex plumbing you’d expect aboard a 1940’s submarine, Freestyle’s electronic systems have a design that may have fitted aboard Captain Picard’s USS Enterprise, right down to the colorful touchscreen interface. Inside it has a flavor-dispensing system inspired by medical use of inkjet technology, with huge dexterity in adding flavors to the outgoing drinks, and even no need for taste-diluting ice as it can super-chill the beverage before delivery if that’s how you want it.